Tickets on sale Saturday for NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament regional games at Cowboys Stadium in March

The Texas Rangers are done for the year. The Dallas Mavericks’ season hasn’t yet started, and the NHL is in a lockout. Now, local sports fans’ attention can turn fully to the Dallas Cowboys, and briefly, to March Madness.

NCAA Men’s Basketball rolls into town at the end of March, and tickets go on sale at 10 a.m. Saturday morning. Cowboys Stadium in Arlington will be the South Regional site on March 29 and 31. Los Angeles will host the West; Washington D.C. has the East; and Indianapolis gets the Midwest.

Cowboys Stadium won the bid to host the NCAA Men’s Basketball Final Four for 2014. But that means they also get regional games the year before. The tickets will be available online atwww.NCAA.com/mbbtickets. The maximum purchase is eight per household at a cost of $50 to $200 each.

The nation’s largest indoor stadium last hosted a basketball game in February 2010, when the NBA All-Star game was played there. The crowd of 108,713 was a basketball attendance record.

But don’t expect a scene like that for the NCAA tournament.

David Worlock, an NCAA spokesman, said the starting point for those regional games at Cowboys Stadium is about 36,000 seats. He said there is a possibility the NCAA could open up more sections in the 400 level and in the corners of the 300 level.

The planned maximum crowd size would be 78,965, which is the configuration for the following year’s Final Four at Cowboys Stadium. A crowd that size would shatter the previous regional record of 57,563 in Detroit in 2008. And that record was 10,000 better than number 2 on the list.

It would also be larger than recent Final Four games but no by that much. Since 2009, the National Semifinals attendance figures have ranged from 71,298 to 75,421. The crowd for the final game are slightly smaller.

If you’d prefer not to wait for Saturday’s sale — and don’t mind spending more, maybe even a lot more — ticket and hospitality packages are available now. A saleswoman with PrimeSport, which handles these packages for the NCAA, said the hospitality includes a regional food spread, two drink tickets, live music and an NCAA tournament “legend” host to be named later. She said the hospitality lounge opens 90 minutes before the game.

How much you’d pay in a premium appears to depend more on the location of the seat than the cost of the hospitality. The priciest seat I found for day 1 was $855 for a ticket (club seat at the side of the court) with $200 face value. A seat nine rows behind that in the same section was $140 less.

In comparison, a lower-level seat in the corner of the stadium, costs $308.75. The face value of that ticket isn’t clear, but it would be either $150 or $200.

Below is a look at Final Four attendance figures during the last decade.